Startup Awards: Vote for Seattle’s ‘Geek of the Year’

Since kicking off the official voting yesterday, we’ve already collected hundreds of votes for the upcoming Seattle 2.0 Startup Awards. And we’re expecting even more ballots to flow in as we highlight the top minds and businesses in the Seattle startup community in the coming days, leading up to the big awards bash May 3rd at the Experience Music Project.

Today, we’re showcasing a fun category: “Geek of the Year.” Here’s how we described this one during the nomination process: “If engineering is the ‘kitchen’ of startups and tech giants, geeks are the top chefs. Nominate the best developers, designers, makers and doers in local tech.”

We’ve got a diverse group of finalists in this category, which is sponsored by Filter. And the competition is pretty tight based on the initial ballots. Vote here if you haven’t already, and if you need help deciding, see more background on each finalist below the poll.

Oren Etzioni: This serial entrepreneur and University of Washington computer scientist — another former Geek of the Week — has made a habit of building businesses based on complex algorithms that help people make decisions, the latest being Decide.com, a startup that forecasts the price of consumer electronics and appliances.